Erotica (from the Greek language Eros – “love”) – are works of art, including literature, photography, film, sculpture and painting, that deal substantively with erotically stimulating or arousing descriptions.
Erotica is rather a modern word used to describe the portrayal of human sensuality and sexuality with high-art aspirations, differentiating such work from commercial pornography. While pornography popularly focuses on unadorned and unemotional lusts and the explicit depiction of sexual acts, erotica tends to define material with a higher emotional content, the development of place, character and story line, or of an overall artistic theme. However, such distinctions are necessarily subjective and may say more about the critic’s own tastes on erotic material than the artistic and other attributes of the material itself. In the motion picture sense, softcore pornography (soft porn) is a similar kind of commercial art form that resides in the area between erotica and hardcore pornography, although erotica, as a type of fine art, may also be highly sexually explicit. The division between erotica and pornography is an aesthetic division, usually dependent on moral philosophy, religious dogma, or personal outlook.
It is a notable trait of the strength of the human reproductive drive relative to the psyche as a whole, that unambiguous reference to sexuality, framed in a manner which the perceiver thereof finds acceptable, tends to initiate an involuntary reaction of sexual arousal, possibly building increased sexual desire, which may lead to creating or taking advantage of opportunity to engage in sexual activity. This can be true of erotica just as well as other, both more and less refined references to sex.
Depictions of the human body which merely fail to conceal or disguise the secondary sexual characteristics of its particular gender may be all that is necessary to trigger arousal in a person who is attracted to that gender.
EROTICA OR PORNOGRAPHY?
For this reason, erotica is too broadly described merely in terms of the effect that it engenders in its audience, as all sexually related matter has the potential to create such an effect.
Gloria Leonard is famously quoted as saying “The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.”
WIKIPEDIA: A further distinction needs be made between erotic art and pornography, which also depicts scenes of love-making and is intended to evoke erotic arousal, but is by definition not fine art. However, no such objective distinction exists; the (lack of) distinction is sometimes facetiously summed up as “That which I like is erotica; that which you like is pornography.”
LINK: Erotic Photography
